Why You Should Not Use WordPress Tags

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WordPress Tags, some love them and others strongly dislike them. Personally, I never use tags. When I started blogging though, I used to create multiple, random tags each time I published a new blog post. And as I got older and wiser, I’ve learnt to step away from using WordPress tags.

And I’m not the only one. Slowly but surely, bloggers and Internet marketers are coming to the conclusion that tags are a bit out of fashion and don’t serve much purpose anymore. And there are certainly no SEO benefits either.

It’s interesting though, because when you start a brand new WordPress blog, one of the first things you’ll come across is the concept of Categories and Tags. They both are a cornerstone feature within WordPress. So why is it that WordPress Tags have lost so much ground?

Differences Between WordPress Tags and Categories

Before we move on, let’s quickly go through the key differences between WordPress Tags and Categories.

Topics

A WordPress category groups related blog posts together. As such, categories should be used to define the broad topics, or sub-niches, of your website.

A tag does not – or should not – represent a broad topic or a niche. A WordPress tag can be used to group together content around much smaller topics that don’t deserve to be categories.

Structure

WordPress allows you to create posts without tags, but not without a category. Each WordPress post must be assigned to a Category, and tags are optional. So in essence, you don’t need tags in order to run a WordPress website.

Categories can be organized in a hierarchical structure with several levels of sub-categories. With tags, you can’t do this. A parent category lists all the posts that are assigned to itself as well as the posts assigned to its sub-categories.

Tag Clouds

Remember those famous tag clouds from back in the day? Literally every single WordPress blog out there would have a tag cloud floating around in their sidebar. It was the thing to do.

If you had a blog, you would have a tag cloud. While some still use them, most bloggers have abandoned these tag clouds.

3 Reasons Why You Should Stop Using WordPress Tags

Okay, so WordPress tags are a bit out of fashion. But there are also more legitimate reasons why your website is much better off without tags. Let’s go through them.

1. Tags Create Thin Content Pages

Thin content basically means content that doesn’t add much value, has little or no substance, and is unlikely to trigger any user engagement. And Google doesn’t like thin content.

Now, the typical Tag page has a title such as “Name of tag – archives”, followed by a list of blog posts.

Other than the excerpts of the blog posts listed in that tag page, there is no content. And if there are very few blog posts, or worse, just one, then the content in this Tag page will be very thin.

In Google’s eyes, a WordPress tag page is another URL within your website. A real page. Just like a 2K words long blog post is a real page. The risk here is that if you have tons of tags defined in your website, the amount of thin content in your site will be significant.

Don’t worry, you won’t get penalized by Google that easily. But you can imagine that this doesn’t exactly benefit the overall content quality of your site either.

2. Tags Often Create Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content becomes an issue when Google can’t work out which two pages in your site should be ranked higher. As a result, Google may decide to not rank either of them.

In the case of tags though, it’s highly unlikely that any of your tag pages end up high in the SERPs, even when they’re used properly.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that if you have lots of random tags floating around in your site, then this will increase the risk of having multiple instances of duplicate content. And this will ultimately downgrade the overall quality of your website.

Duplicate content can also exist between a category and a tag that represent the same topic. For example, if you have a category about flowers and you also have a tag with the same name, you will have two very similar pages within your site.

Important note:

With tags and categories, it’s important to always use excerpts, not the complete posts. If your tag or category pages display posts in their entirety, this will heavily increase the risk of duplicate content issues. An excerpt of a few lines, or even a few short paragraphs, works much better.

3. Tags Are Confusing

Yes, WordPress tags often increase confusion. For readers, for the search engines, as well as for bloggers themselves.

Confusing for readers

Some may think tags are beneficial from a user perspective. But in fact the user experience typically suffers. It’s confusing for your readers as tags make it harder for them to understand the structure of your site.

While internal links are important, it’s also important to not have too many links. It’s important to not let your readers click away to any random page.

A clean website structure always results in a better user experience. You basically want to take your readers by the hand and help them navigate through your site.

Confusing for search engines

Confusing for the search engines because the more tags you use, the harder it is for them to understand what your site is about.

And therefore it’s harder for them to qualify you as an authority in the topics you’re writing about. There is simply too much going on in your site without a clear structure.

Confusing for bloggers

Confusing for bloggers that use the tags as well. I’ve seen so many websites that have literally created hundreds of tags over the years. And lots of these tags only have one or perhaps a handful of posts associated with them. How can one keep track of so much clutter?

What often adds to the confusion is that too many bloggers don’t fully understand the essential difference between tags and categories. As a result, they use them interchangeably.

In other words, they would create tags that really should be categories, and create categories that should instead be tags.

You can use Yoast to to exclude WordPress tags from your sitemap and to stop the search engines from indexing them.

All you need to do is simply set the below option to No and your tags won’t be indexed.

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Final Thoughts

I must admit, I am a little opinionated here. Some people swear by using tags. And that’s cool, as long as they do it properly. Use WordPress tags the way they should be used and your site will be fine.

So, if you really want to use WordPress tags, keep these three things in mind:

Keep a clear distinction between Categories and Tags:
Categories are the core of your site architecture. The categories should define the topics of your site. Tags perform a far less important role within your site.

Use them to improve navigation:
Add (relevant) tags to a blog post so that readers can read more related posts. But make sure these tags that have at least three or four posts associated with them, otherwise there is not much point.

Use them to improve bounce rate:
Using tags can increase bounce rate if visitors click on them. But for this to happen, these tags need to be relevant and strategically placed.

So, what should we, who has been using tags for years, do now? I found your blog while exploring the subject of tags, because I started to see for myself that it does not make too much sense using it. I have more than 4,000 tags on my website. Many of them are very thin with content, as you say. Should I delete all tags? If I just no-index them for google, still there is a problem from a user perspective.

Nice one AJ, I was trying to create a “Silo structure” for my website, and I thought that Tags aren’t really helping, so I’ll be deleting those “useless tags” and redirect the ones already ranking to similar posts (not sure about this option).

Still have a question for you AJ, do you think creating Pages is better or Categories (when making a Silo structure)?

Pages and Categories will both work really well to define the content structure of your website. With Pages you typically have more design options, especially when using a page builder such as Architect or Elementor. Categories are good too, as long as you optimize them with a good introduction, title, description, etc.

Before reading your article, I was leaning strongly toward not displaying the tags. After reading your article, I’m convinced that I don’t need them showing, especially since the “recommended articles” is created based on tags.

What do you think, though. Do I need a prev/next (by category) + recommended articles (by tags), or is that too much on the page?

Internal linking is important, but the best internal links live inside the content.

You could try using a heatmap such as Hotjar in combination with a deep dive into Google Analytics. A heatmap will show you where people actually click, you may be surprised how few clicks these “prev/next” and “related” links actually get.

No, not necessarily. E-commerce is a whole different beast. On an e-commerce site, you’d want visitors to click around as much as possible, presenting them with more products to sell. Tags could certainly be a good way to achieve exactly that.

Firstly, great article. Just what I was looking for to show a client why they should NOT be using tags in their particular instance.

Agreed, eCommerce is different in some senses, you definitely want people to walk up and down the aisles, pass a few bargain buckets, hang around and click around, it boosts your relevance through visitor engagement. However, I firmly believe that a large part of eCommerce is essentially a blog. After all, a WooCommerce product is just a custom post type, a blog post in essence with some extra data fields and functionality. Set up with the right hosting and light-weight page / template design, keywording your products, carefully tagging them, describing them in short, snappy, relevant sentences will give you the best chance of achieving meaningful organic search results.

I set up a WooCommerce store for a Chinese takeaway around 3 years ago. There were 340+ items spread over 16+ categories, starters / set meals / drinks / curry dishes / chicken dishes etc. tags were one of the best ways to get the visitor to where they want to be. Particularly in product search.

I looked at all the data, picked the common or significant denominators within the menu items and produced a controlled list of tags to cover various ingredients and other provisions such as “Gluten Free”. This way the tags seemed to behave in a more uniform and sympathetic way with the categories. I did a lot of testing, trying things different ways around, just to get the thing to behave like a traditional printed menu in one sense and like a searchable blog in another.

My personal opinion of tags is they’re usually useless for most websites due to specificity of content……. If you make / sell / install windows, there are a few materials and a few applications. It’s unlikely you are going to be creating content outside of those topics or keywords. However, if you make or just sell lots of different items, or have large archives of specification sheets as an example, tags can be pretty handy to help refine search results within the WordPress search function. Producing “thinner content” (in this case shorter, more relevant archive lists / search results), right where it’s needed so visitors can get straight to the meat and potatoes that they’re looking for.

It also worked very well on Google, where I’d been getting results for “Just Eat” and many other majors / locals in the above the fold positions for various search strings. Within a couple of weeks my little takeaway website was quite often taking 1-2-3 positions.

Yes, this example is small, yes, it’s localised. The theory and process is identical for a little Chinese takeaway, a large blog or even a drop-shipper with 10,000 products.

Tags, properly used, can definitely help to refine categories / archive lists really well, particularly if you have hundreds of posts.

If you don’t have lots of content in the form of posts or products, your archive lists are going to be short. It’s just quicker, easier and more pleasurable for the visitor to quickly scan down the short lists and visually pick what they’re looking for in as few clicks as possible. Tags are just adding weight and confusion to the mix in this situation.

Hope this helps, as with many things in web development, there isn’t always a right or wrong way, we can just try to adhere to best practices and learn from other peoples misery and success!

Hi there, I’m AJ, a corporate IT nerd turned digital marketing pro, specializing in SEO and content strategy. I am using Blog Pioneer to help you achieve success online by sharing some of my knowledge and experience.Read more…